About the NHSD
The NHSD provides nationally consistent, authoritative, reliable and easily accessible information about health and related services to enable consumers to make appropriate choices when seeking these services.
It supports healthcare provider communication and the exchange of clinical information via secure messaging endpoints and identifiers.
The NHSD aggregates large datasets from across the health sector to provide complete, accurate and up-to-date information about health services. This data is searchable through standardised application programming interfaces (APIs), the healthdirect Service Finder (Opens in new tab) - a digital self-help health tool - and widgets embedded into the systems and websites of health organisations.
These enable health professionals and consumers to navigate health service information quickly, safely and reliably.
150,000 health services are accessible via the NHSD and are searched more than 2.2 million times each month across all platforms.
For more information, download The Role of the NHSD in digital health (Opens in new tab).
Role of the NHSD in national digital health
The NHSD is identified in the Intergovernmental Agreement on National Digital Health (Opens in new tab) as a core piece of national digital health infrastructure, enabling interoperability and connected data across Australia’s health care settings to support high quality patient care and improve the efficiency and sustainability of the health care system.
It supports Australia’s National Digital Health Strategy (Opens in new tab) for improving digital health integration across the health system and is a key enabler of the National Healthcare Interoperability Plan (Opens in new tab), which outlines the vision for sharing consumer health information in a safe, secure and seamless manner.
The NHSD data model aligns to the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Australian Provider Directory (AU PD) Standard to facilitate interoperability. It utilises the Systemised Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT-AU), a standardised international clinical healthcare terminology which is an essential part of improving the connectivity of health information.
Healthdirect Australia develops data sharing partnerships with government and industry to leverage existing investments and meet coverage and quality requirements, while also ensuring the data in the NHSD is accessible. This has enabled data sharing with more than 25 two-way data sharing partners and over 100 integration partners which use NHSD data.
This approach optimises investment in existing national infrastructure, reducing duplication in collating and managing health service information databases across the sector.
Usage across the health system
The NHSD sources, aggregates and publishes health service data and has developed capabilities to support data sharing that are used in multiple ways.
The three key user groups are: consumers; practitioners and health service providers; and health departments and other health organisations.
The NHSD meets the increasing demand of consumers seeking health provider information, surfacing this information via a consumer-friendly interface, the healthdirect Service Finder (Opens in new tab) and web-based widgets hosted by health organisations.
The NHSD supports practitioners and health systems through FHIR-based services, integrating with clinical systems to support practitioners in a range of healthcare delivery pathways, such as referrals and the sending of discharge summaries through secure messaging to other providers and individual practitioners.
Health departments and organisations recognise the value of quality data hosted and managed in the NHSD for developing policy, planning and for academic research.
The NHSD is funded to deliver solutions for the following uses:
For further information, download Why integrate with the NHSD (Opens in new tab).